Plague Journal (56): on the annihilation of the truth

Yesterday for the first time in a while I went somewhere other than the grocery store. To the chiropractor, in fact. These days you're not allowed to arrive early and wait for your appointment in the cramped lobby. About 3 minutes before my appointment time I got a text that let me know I was now allowed to enter. Other people were waiting in their cars out in the lot. 

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Trump's tweetstorms. Crazy, right? Yesterday he suggested that one of his longstanding bête noirs in the media may have committed murder. Which made me think of a recent Washington Monthly article, which opens with a quote from Peter Wehner, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, who said that the coming election will be "a referendum on reality and epistemology."

Trump and his apparatchiks will not only step up their propaganda; they will increase their efforts to exhaust our critical thinking and to annihilate truth, in the words of the Russian dissident Garry Kasparov. We will see even more “alternative facts.” We will see even more brazen attempts to rewrite history. We will hear even more crazy conspiracy theories. We will witness even more lashing out at reporters, more rage, and more lies.

Look up that word "epistemology" and you may happen on this: "Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion."

Like no other election in my lifetime, this one coming up will not only feature a disagreement on the issues, but a disagreement about the very nature of truth. It's as if there was a major segment of the country that for years has been chaffing under the constraints of logic, fairness, and decency, just waiting for someone to come along and justify them in saying whatever they want and calling it truth. 

Remember when conservatives used to huff about post-modernism and the idea that everybody has his or her own truth? "No," they protested, "truth is truth! If everything is true, then nothing is true!" Except, not anymore. Now every spurious but politically convenient claim is paraded as "justified belief," from baseless innuendo to serial name-calling to the preferred conspiracy-theory-of-the-week. We are all relativists now.